VMworld 2011: Announcing VMware Horizon Mobile

We are very excited to announce VMware Horizon Mobile Manager at VMworld 2011. Horizon Mobile Manager is a product that will allow enterprise IT administrators to create, provision, monitor and manage a corporate phone that will be running on an employee-owned smart phone. In this blog, I will provide context for this product, highlight some of its key capabilities and tie Horizon Mobile Manager back to our vision for the post-PC era.

BackgroundAs part of our mobile strategy, we had been working on bringing virtualization to mobile devices with a focus first on one use case – allowing enterprises to support employee-owned smart phones without compromising security, auditability and manageability of the corporate content that is present on the employee’s device. We demoed VMware Mobile Virtualization Platform (MVP), the key underlying technology that enables us to support two phones in one – one phone for personal use and another phone for work use but both phones on a single physical phone.

From an employee perspective, they are happy because they can now use their favorite personal device to accomplish work without having to carry two phones. But how does an IT administrator manage the corporate side of your phone? How would the admin create, provision, manage the work phone for you? Let me introduce you to VMware Horizon Mobile Manager.

Key capabilities of VMware Horizon Mobile ManagerHorizon Mobile Manager is a web-based product that allows IT administrators to comprehensively manage the lifecycle of the work phone from creating it to wiping it. The key capabilities of Horizon Mobile Manager are:

Use templates to create a work phone

Leverage policy management engine to define what the user can and cannot do in the work phone

Provision the work phone over-the-air

Review health of the deployment and vital stats from a dashboard

Push applications over-the-air to the work phone from the app catalog

Lock or wipe to de-provision the work phone

Come to the MVP breakout session at … to see the Horizon Mobile Manager live.

Post-PC era visionAs we look at how enterprise computing is evolving, it is clear that computing is no longer just about PCs and Windows. The ball-and-chain relationship between users and their PCs is broken. Smartphones and tablets are fast becoming not only tier 1 platforms but in some cases, they are the preferred devices that employees are using. The number of smartphones and tablets sold will exceed the number of PCs sold for the first time in 2011 but the shift has already happened in that the amount of time we spend on non-PC devices is already higher than what we spend on PCs.

In addition to the increasing diversity of devices, there is increasing diversity in the kinds of applications we consume as well – SaaS, mobile applications, etc. Needless to say, this is a hard environment for IT to manage.

Our vision for this new paradigm is to allow IT to manage users, not devices. Each employee has multiple devices and devices come and go so that cannot be the unit of management anymore. VMware Horizon is our umbrella initiative that will allow administrators to provision any application to any device that a user happens to use.

We introduced Horizon Applications Manager earlier this year to allow administrators to provision and manage SaaS applications. We are now adding the ability to provision Windows applications so that Horizon Application Manager can now support SaaS and Windows applications. Horizon Mobile Manager adds mobile application and workspace management so together Horizon now covers SaaS, Windows and mobile applications.